"One Million Kingdoms,
2001, is the most recent in a series of animated films in which a
Japanese anime character, the brooding young girl AnnLee, is inserted
into various dramas. Here she is dropped into a lunar landscape that is
mapped out and developed in correspondence with the rises and falls of
the narrator's voice - tinny, at times labored - digitally derived from a
recording of Neil Armstrong. The stories of the first moon landing, in
1969, and of Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth
have been conflated here in a conspiracy theory of the faked and the
fantastic. Armstrong's first words - It's a lie - prompt AnnLee, as she
moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating terrain, in which
mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise and fall according to
the intonations of the narrator's voice. His words blur the fictional
and factual, using language that derives from distinct genres and
centuries—Verne's work of fiction and Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's
presumably true transmissions of their experience during the landing of
Apollo 11's lunar module. Thus the landscape of AnnLee is a shifting
terrain determined by utterances, which chart both the real and the
imaginary.

..In Pierre Huyghe's
One Million Kingdoms, a voice maps out unexplored lunar terrain. The
voice belongs to a Japanese Manga character named AnnLee, for which
Huyghe, along with artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe
Parreno, purchased the copyright in 1999. Featured in previous works by
the three artists, here this brooding young girl speaks in a voice that
is an electronically altered version of the astronaut Neil Armstrong's
communiqués from the first moon landing; the text she recites conflates
Armstrong's historic utterances with excerpts from Jules Verne's 1895
novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Armstrong's words prompt
AnnLee as she moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating
landscape, in which mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise
and fall according to the sound waves of his (her) voice."

"Using time, memory, and the texture of everyday experience as his mediums, Pierre Huyghe
conflates the traditional dichotomy between art and life. Working in an
array of cultural formats—from billboards and television broadcasts to
community celebrations and museum exhibitions—he reformulates their
codes and deploys them as catalysts for creating new experiential
possibilities. A mode of perception that lies in the interstices between
reality and its representation is the subject of his two-channel video,
The Third Memory, which reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon
(1975). Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the
heist's charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of
that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank. However, rather
than clarify the personal history that Hollywood wrested from him,
Wojtowicz appears to have been heavily influenced by the film, a
testament to the inextricable merging of real events, the distortions of
memory, and the mediating power of popular culture.
The tension between fact and fiction is also at play in One Million Kingdoms, a work conceived as part of the collaborative project No Ghost Just a Shell,
in which a manga character named Annlee is inserted into multiple
artistic contexts. In Huyghe's animation, this adolescent girl wanders
through a shifting lunar topography and, speaking in a digitally
synthesized form of astronaut Neil Armstrong's voice, delivers a
narration blending the actual transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission
with excerpts from Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Annlee appears as a translucent outline, an empty cipher for creative
interpretation. Yet at the same time, she is literally the author of her
own environment: the mutating features of the landscape through which
she walks are generated by the inflections of her own voice. Huyghe's
own experience provides the starting point for This is not a time for dreaming.
The film documents a puppet show that tells the parallel stories of the
modernist architect Le Corbusier's commission to design the Carpenter
Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, and Huyghe's own
commission to create an artwork to celebrate the building's 40th
anniversary. Shifting back and forth in time, the narrative weaves
together historical and contemporary events with fantastical elements,
in an allegorical representation of the struggles and compromises
inherent in the creative process." - Guggenheim colelction

"An animated neon waif walks across the screen while a
male voice speaks and subtitles run. In the background, icebergs sprout
and recede like a sea of cubist stalagmites. Subtitles inform us that
Jules Verne began the epic journey in A Journey to the Center of the
Earth in the same region of Iceland that NASA practiced lunar rover
operations. The narrator’s voice sounds like an astronaut speaking
through a space helmet. A couple of phrases stand out: “prepare us for
the spectacle of isolation” and “we want to enter the unknown where the
greatest mysteries are under our footsteps.”
It is hard to understand the distorted soundtrack, especially while
reading the seemingly unrelated subtitles and watching the cartoon all
at once. Each element of the piece requires focusing on it to the
exclusion of all other elements. The viewer is required to deconstruct
the piece in order to take it all in. Eventually the video ends,
somewhat arbitrarily.
Reading the exhibition catalog, one finds out that the cartoon waif’s
name is Annlee, and the rights to her image were purchased and in turn
loaned to thirteen artists to create artwork—a digital Mono Lisa pimped
out to the highest bidder. One Million Kingdoms is one in a
thirteen-part series titled No Ghost Just A Shell, inspired by the
animated Japanese film Ghost In the Shell. Got that? There’s more. The
narrator’s synthetic voice is in fact Neil Armstrong reading from A
Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The visual simplicity of One Million Kingdoms belies the density of
Verne’s nineteenth-century text and, ultimately, the artist’s intention.
Huyghe states, “In this piece, Annlee is expressing the consequences of
what we do. She is walking in the consequence of what she is planning
and what she is saying.” OK, but Annlee looks like she’d be a lot
happier on Venice Beach with a skateboard. There is too much going on,
threaded together in a way that makes the whole less than the sum of its
parts.
... Huyghe’s work, like most post modern gestures, is at odds with itself,
unable to saturate our senses or complete a thought. We are constantly
required to shift gears from reading to listening to viewing; the magic
of instant effect is sacrificed. Paradoxically, this halting quality is
exacerbated by what seems to be the static nature of video. Unlike
painting and sculpture, video runs at one speed unless you’ve got a
remote control. You can neither breeze past it nor linger over it. Its
temporal quality is rigid. And unlike painting and sculpture, video
lacks a sensual, material presence underlying the viewing experience,
appealing instead to the narrative regions of our brains. Huyghe’s
blending of fiction and history is intriguing, but if it is possible for
art to be more layered and dependant on the crutch of written
explanation, one shudders." -Kevin Bouchard

Flatform - Quantum + Trento Symphonia + Movements of an Impossible Time + A Place to Come + Can Not Be Anything Against the Wind + 57.600 Seconds of Invisible Night and Light + Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. + About zero + With Nature There Are no Special Effects, Only Consequences (f)

Ben Rivers - The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (f)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad - Glory Tree (m)

Thomas Adès - The Twenty-Fifth Hour (m)

Daníel Bjarnason - Over Light Earth + Processions + Solaris (m)

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (m)

Jacek Sienkiewicz - Nomatter (m)

Veli-Matti Puumala - Anna Liisa (m)

Bill Douglas - Trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home (f)

DIALECT - Gowanus Drifts (m)

Robert Enrico - Au coeur de la vie (f)

Kara-lis Coverdale & LXV - Sirens (m)

Uljana Wolf - i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (b)

Mempo Giardinelli - Sultry Moon (b)

Jean-Marie Straub - Dialogue d'ombres (f)

Klaus Hoffer - Among the Bieresch (b)

Maxim Biller - U glavi Brune Schulza (b)

Svend Åge Madsen - Days with Diam + Virtue & Vice in the Middle Time (b)